The speech Netanyahu should make

This Thursday, President Obama will give a speech about the Middle East.

It will undoubtedly suggest that the death of bin Laden and the political upheavals in Arab countries imply that the future of the Arab world is bright and democratic. It will not take notice of the fact that Egypt, the largest and most important member of it, is moving rapidly toward an Islamist takeover. It will not mention that the West has sat quietly while Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad sent his security forces to murder, torture and rape thousands.

It will certainly mention Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. And the timing is interesting. Israeli PM Netanyahu will be coming to the US the next day, and is planning to speak before a joint session of Congress. Netanyahu is a very effective and persuasive speaker, and his speech was expected to energize Israel’s Congressional supporters. Now it will be transformed into a reaction to whatever ‘The Leader of the Free World’ says on Thursday.

With the new international security credibility he earned by overseeing the successful assassination of Osama Bin Laden, Obama apparently believes that he can withstand Congressional pressure and make the case for demanding that Israel surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Hamas and its partners in Fatah.

I don’t know. But I do know that the nakba day festivities, which included attempts to overrun Isarel’s borders from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, a rampage by an Arab truck driver in Tel Aviv which by sheer luck left only one Israeli dead, and various riots, stabbings, etc. sent the message that the Fatah/Hamas Palestinian Authority (PA) — and the ‘Palestinian people’ themselves — are not in any way peace partners.

Just in case there is still someone who doesn’t understand this, I’ll remind you that the nakba narrative refers to the entire land of Israel, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which the Palestinian Arabs have convinced themselves belongs to them.

The Palestinian national movement is the effort to get it away from the occupying Jews. This has nothing to do with 1967 or with the Palestinian yearning for a state of their own. Rather, it is about the ending of the Jewish occupation and the physical possession of the land, all of the land.

Palestinian Arab leader Mahmoud Abbas made it clear yet again that the goal of the movement is to bring some 4 or 5 million descendents of Arabs who may have lived in the land before 1948 into Israel to dispossess the Jews:

Ramallah – Every Palestinian has the right to see his homeland and the leadership will never give up the right of return, President Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday.

‘We want every Palestinian to see Palestine,’ he told a group of Palestinians from neighbouring Arab countries who were visiting the West Bank.

‘The return is something that should be done on the ground, and not just a slogan. Palestine is for us, and if you were from the north, the centre or the south and lived anywhere in it, then you are in the homeland,’ Abbas said.

His statement came on the eve of what Palestinians call Nakba, now marked each year on the day when most of them fled their homes in 1948 following the creation of Israel.

According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), there are an estimated 4.8 million people registered as Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza.

‘The Palestinian leadership will never give up the right of return and that will be through practical steps and return to the homeland to end living in exile because the homeland is our final destination,’ Abbas said.

President Obama, in his famous Cairo speech, genuflected to ‘Palestinian aspirations’. We are already used to the ambiguous way in which this is meant — to Arabs it means the end of Israel, but to Americans and Israelis it is supposed to mean two states for two peoples, living side by side in peace, etc. But as it becomes more and more evident to Israelis — and this weekend’s events bring it home — that the Palestinian leadership, now allied with the antisemitic and genocidal Hamas, is an enemy, not a partner, the US administration’s pronouncements about the need to implement a solution to the conflict sound more and more disingenuous.

There is something infuriating about listening to Israeli leaders agreeing with US officials about the need to achieve peace via a two-state solution, when you know that they know that it’s a complete fantasy — or worse, a way to make a piecemeal process of surrender palatable to victims about to be sacrificed by the West on the altar of a completely distorted perception of its true interests.

So — let Obama do his worst on Thursday. Then maybe (but I’m not betting) Netanyahu will finally make a speech like this:

To the honorable members of the US House and Senate:

You know and I know that the Palestinian Arabs — their leaders and the people in the street — have no intention of making peace with us.

You know and I know that they are expecting that the world, led by the United States, will tear off as much as it can of the only Jewish state, the only tiny piece of the world where Jews ought to be able to feel that they belong and are finally safe from antisemitism, pogroms and expulsion — and hand it to the Palestinian Arabs.

You know and I know that as soon as they get that piece of our land, they will continue their vicious struggle for the rest of it.

We are not taken in by the twisting of truth and the false application of the languages of human rights and international law, and I hope that you are not either.

I am here to tell you that we are not playing this game. We will not cooperate. Everyone has on his or her desk a copy of the Hamas covenant. Read it carefully and you will understand why we consider these creatures our deadly enemies.

Our intention is to defend ourselves against them, rather than cooperate in the destruction of the Jewish state that we finally regained after two thousand years of exile and persecution. We will not permit the re-dispersal of the Jewish people.

Members of Congress, and President Obama: with all due respect, take your ‘peace’ plans, processes, frameworks, roadmaps, freezes, etc. and line your birdcages and litter boxes with them.

2 Responses to “The speech Netanyahu should make”

While it would be respectful to request that the Congress take the Obama “peace” plan and use it to line their birdcages and litter boxes, I would suggest that Mr. Obama take the plan and gently place it “where the sun don’t shine.”